Chuck Sweeny: Whitman faux interchange was a colossal mistake

Monday

Jan 6, 2014 at 2:59 PMJan 6, 2014 at 4:21 PM

Should Rockford embark on another major road reconstruction, or should the city devote a lot more money to fixing neighborhood and collector streets?

That's what comes to mind when you take a look at the planners' next big idea - eliminating the 1960s spaghetti junction known laughingly (by me) as the Whitman Street Interchange. I say laughingly because it doesn't really interchange anything. It's a strange, "you-can't-get-there-from-here," politically influenced affair to make sure we down-market west-siders could not get on Rural Street after crossing the Whitman Street Bridge. And so it is to this day, when Rural Street neighborhoods are no longer exclusive enclaves controlled by industrialists.

Question: If they didn't want us to get to Rural Street, why'd they build the bridge in the first place?

What they did was to bulldoze dozens of homes in a neat, working-class neighborhood of the near east side, for no good reason except to tell the world that yes, Rockford could build confusing junctions, just like big cities, by golly! The "interchange" appeared prominently in Chamber of Commerce promotional brochures.

When it comes to Rockford road projects, I wish we could have skipped the 1950s and 1960s. As weasel-worded politicians say, "mistakes were made." Planners assumed the Woodruff Avenue Expressway would soon be built from the far southeast side, following the railroad alignment through the city and into downtown area, probably along North Second Street and north to Wisconsin. (The phantom expressway was re-named to honor Swedish diplomat and war hero Raoul Wallenberg. Some honor!)

Other streets were redesigned to connect to the phantom expressway. Sixth and Ninth streets were widened and converted to one-ways to connect to the expressway. The "cloverleaf" at Spring Creek Road and North Second Street was constructed in two phases, and North Second was made a six-lane through Sinnissippi Park, taking out valuable park land, crushing the sunken gardens into a narrow sliver of land. And yes, the Whitman Street Bridge and faux interchange were built.

All this infrastructure was designed to handle traffic streaming through greater Rockford on the new expressway. Without the expressway, which we no longer need because traffic patterns have changed dramatically, we don't need all the connections to it.

We do know that $4 million will be needed to fix or replace bridges on the Whitman spaghetti junction. Or, we know that to rebuild the "interchange" into a smaller, simpler intersection that would take up much less space, would cost $15.5 million.

What to do? Fix the bridges for $4 million and write off the Whitman Street "interchange" as a mistake too big to fix? Or do we set aside money to rebuild the whole shebang? Aldermen are wrestling with that.

Meanwhile, we have residential streets in various stages of disrepair in older neighborhoods on both sides of the river. Some aldermen, like Tom McNamara, the 3rd Ward Democrat, want to spend more on those kinds of streets, and if you drive through his ward you'll understand why. Forlorn streets abound. The same is true of the 2nd, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 11th and 13th wards.

Fact is, we'll never have enough money to fix all streets. The reason has to do with city government's historic failure to spend sufficient money on basic infrastructure from incorporation in 1852 through the 1970s. Only when John McNamara (Tom's dad) became mayor in 1981 was an ongoing, five-year capital improvement plan adopted. But we'll always be playing catch-up. Thanks, forefathers!